“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”
I suppose it was inevitable. The Bush Doctrine of illegal preventive war has never ruled out the use of an unprovoked nuclear attack. So why wouldn’t they use it?
The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”
The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.
One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,” The New Yorker pointed out.
In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.
But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.
“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.
“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,” the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.
It’s hard to believe they think that they have the political latitude to do this. But then it was hard to believe they thought they had the political latitude to govern as if they had won landslide elections or that they could survive the 2004 election if no WMD were found in Iraq. But they did. In fact, they’ve had their biggest successes by pushing the envelope beyond the point anyone would have imagined. I do not put it past them to believe that they can do this and somehow revive their flagging popularity.
Update: I wonder which top Democrat whose name sounds like Schlieberman the administration has been talking to?
I’ve got yer journalistic expertise for ya right here:
Libby testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks BY WARREN P. STROBEL AND RON HUTCHESON Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON – The revelation that President Bush authorized former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to divulge classified information about Iraq fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration’s political agenda.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.
But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.
The White House tried today to quell the furor over the leaking of sensitive prewar intelligence on Iraq, as President Bush’s spokesman insisted that the president had the authority to declassify and release information “in the public interest” and had never done so for political reasons.
The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said a decision was made to declassify and release some information to rebut “irresponsible and unfounded accusations” that the administration had manipulated or misused prewar intelligence to buttress its case for war.
[…]
Mr. McClellan said the Democrats who pounced on Mr. Libby’s assertions that Mr. Bush had given him, through the vice president, the authority to talk to a reporter about some material in the intelligence estimate were “engaging in crass politics” in refusing to recognize the distinction between legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest and the irresponsible leaking of intelligence for political reasons.
If it was a legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest, why didn’t the president just call a press conference? Why all the cloak and dagger stuff?
I think we all know that Chris Matthews is a strange fellow. And he often sounds a little bit less than with it. But this really takes the cake. He seems to think that he’s figured out the secret GOP strategy for the fall:
MATTHEWS: …I’ve been thinking now for a couple of days now at least that what the Democrats are going to face this fall, what the Republicans are probably going to throw at them is, “You think we’re bad, we got a guy named Safavian you never heard of and we got this guy DeLay. He’s gone now. And we’re no day at the beach, but look what they’ve got. They’ve got a bunch of crazy guys who are going to try to lynch the president. They are going to try to censure him, but ideally they are going to try to impeach him. They are going to use the subpoena power to go crazy. Don’t let John Conyers of Michigan” —
Doesn’t it sound like he believes that he came up with this himself? And yet:
WASHINGTON, March 15 – Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.
The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives’ plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.
With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.
“Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now,” Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.
The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party’s demoralized base to go to the polls. With “impeachment on the horizon,” he wrote, “maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all.”
There goes Matthews, repeating this as if he thought it up all by himself. And in the process, of course, getting the theme out there on behalf of the Republicans.
I have always enjoyed Michelle Cottle’s writing in the New Republic. She has an irreverent style and often looks at politics and culture with a fresh perspective that’s interesting and fun. So, I was taken aback by this recent article about the “democratization of journalism” in which she advises the media not to forget its prerogatives:
I realize these are unsettling times for the Fourth Estate. The web is changing the way people consume news. The Bushies, along with their conservative media colleagues, have spent the past several years trashing mainstream journalists as ideologically motivated and morally bankrupt. Jayson Blair has convinced readers we’re making it all up. Dan Rather has convinced them we’re all unpatriotic Bush haters. And every remotely controversial news story winds up sliced, diced, and julienned by an overcaffeinated blogosphere with a chip on its shoulder about the arrogant, self-satisfied, lazy, corrupt “old media.” It’s hardly surprising that polls show our public credibility headed towards that of Jack Abramoff.
[…]
I realize it’s very popular–not to mention economically savvy–to talk about “giving readers what they want.” And I’m in no way suggesting that we ratchet back the “soft news” or “lifestyle journalism” pieces that keep readers subscribing. (Hell, without its Wedding Pages, the Sunday New York Times would only have two dozen readers.) But determining what merits serious, front-page coverage really should be left to people whose careers have been in the service of the news.
How then can we explain the decision by the Washington Post today to bury the story on page nine that a Bush administration verified that the president had, in fact, authorized Libby to leak selected parts of a classified NIE? Or how can we explain Judith Miller’s bogus WMD stories, or wrongly headlining the Florida recount claims, or front page giggling over Al Gore and earth tones, or succumbing to Lewinsky madness, or pimping Republican operative Whitewater nonsense? It was the choice of these front page stories, and many, many more, that led so many members of the public to mistrust the media’s ability to think for itself.
The mindless run-up to war is the perfect example. There was plenty of information at the time that could have allowed for a more thoughtful debate, but the Washington Post (just one example) chose to bury the information. Cottle scoffs at the press “self-flagellating” but the post itself admits that they did not exercise “serious, front-page” news judgment during that period:
Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
But he ran into resistance from the paper’s editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, “helped sell the story,” Pincus recalled. “Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper.” Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.
“We did our job but we didn’t do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder,” Woodward said in an interview. “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier” than widely believed. “Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page.”
Overcaffeinated or not, the public (which includes bloggers) is well within its rights to question the press’ vaunted professionalism considering its recent performance. And considering that even today the flagship DC newspaper continues to miss the story, I think we are right to keep the pressure on. I know it’s unpleasant for them to be questioned, what with their superior credentials, experience and expertise, but the stakes are too high to ignore.
For my part, I waited for more than a decade for the press to report what I could see with my own eyes: a powerful political party had morphed into a criminal enterprise that was bent on permanently altering our fundamental system of government. This is not hyperbole. The Republicans wrote about their dreams of empire and executive infallibility. They advertised their plan to dominate Washington. The information was available to those who had the time and patience to wade through the cacophony of media static to find it. But the media itself behaved like a flock of birds, startling to every rightwing noise and flying off together into whatever direction the Republicans wanted them to go.
The smear jobs of the early to mid-90’s were not new. The Republicans did it better than most, but they didn’t invent it. They fed damaging titillating information to a gullible and eager press at a time when harsh competition, 24 hour cable and tabloid ethics were starting to permeate the news media. It created a constant sense of crisis that served them well when they upped the ante.
But tabloid smears aside, using institutional power and the levers of government to deny the people their democratically elected choice of president, whether it was through impeachment or the Supreme Court deciding an election, was not business as usual. Openly abrogating treaties and setting forth an aggressive doctine of preventive war is not business as usual. Consciously governing on a strictly partisan basis in order to render the opposition completely impotent despite its near parity in the nation, is not something we’ve ever seen in American politics. Using the power of the executive in “wartime” (the war being purely defined by the executive) to embed a theory of a unitary executive is a dramatic shift in the constitutional design of checks and balances. None of this is benign. These are steps toward dictatorship.
I can see this. Millions of people in this country can see this. But the press has behaved for the last decade as if nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. Indeed, they have participated in this ongoing constitutional crisis, not by just turning the other cheek, but by actively taking the bait and running with the cheap tabloid distractions of the 90’s and then the martial fervor of the aught years.
Cottle believes that all this anger at the press is because we bloggers think we are qualified to be journalists:
And make no mistake. No matter how half-assed or silly it may at times seem from the outside, journalism is a real, grown-up profession in which, as with nearly every other job on the planet, experience and acquired skill matter. While that may sound obvious, I’m convinced that a sizeable chunk of the public can’t quite get past its belief that any idiot can be a journalist because, by and large, it doesn’t require the same sort of specialized or technical knowledge as being a doctor, chemical engineer, or CPA. (Just look at all the articles and blog posts cheering the death of the exclusionary, elitist big media and the rise of the web-empowered citizen journalist.) It’s a little like the disdain with which many people quietly view child care providers: It can’t take much skill or smarts to tend to a child, because look at how many clueless teenage moms do it every day. Likewise, folks figure that any idiot can form an opinion and write a sentence, so what’s so tough about being a journalist?
What an odd analogy. I see what she is saying and it’s certainly true that parenting, like journalism, takes skill. But is Cottle then also suggesting that there is some small elite minority of parents who can do it well?
I would suggest that just as there are many millions of good parents out there, there are millions of informed, engaged citizens who can read and think and see the world around them without having to be credentialed members of the press corps. And they see a media that is not doing a proper job of speaking truth to power.
Cottle concludes:
Certainly, journalists could stand to pay closer attention to what’s happening in the communities they cover–or, in the case of the national media, to venture beyond the rarefied cultural bubble of the New York-to-Washington corridor. But it’s absurd, not to mention counterproductive, to think any of us can win readers’ admiration by further undermining the notion of journalists as serious professionals with acquired knowledge and expertise. If members of the news media can’t take what they do for a living seriously, how can they possibly expect anyone else to?
I think the greatest “expertise” any professional journalist should develop over the course of years of reporting or editing is the ability to detect bullshit when they see it. The last ten years of collective mainstream political journalism proves that there is far less “expertise” in the professional media than the professional media thinks there is.
Scotty is having a fit trying to make a distinction between the president leaking classified information and the NSA whistleblowers leaking classified information by saying that the first leak was in the public interest and the second harmed national security. He’s getting very hot under the collar trying to make that case. Clearly, they are very worried about this and they should be.
Here’s the problem. The president pretended that he was disturbed by the leaks in the Plame case and said he wanted the perpetrator to come forward. Now we find out that he was personally authorizing the leak for political purposes. Scotty can call it “in the public interest” but everyone knows it was in the political interest of the president.
The illegal NSA wiretapping program depends upon the nation placing their trust in this same president not to use this warrantless writetapping for political purposes. The fact that he authorized leaking of sensitive classified information for political purposes proves that we should not do this.
They are trying to muddy up the waters with all kinds of arguments about good leaks and bad leaks and what is and isn’t in the public interest. There are issues to be explored of whether or not the president was trying to set the record straight or lying further with the leaking of this NIE. And there are good arguments to be made about all of that. But it is this matter of trust that presents the biggest danger to them.
A reporter needs to ask the following question:
If the president was willing to authorize leaking of national security information to reporters for political purposes, why should we believe he won’t authorize warrantless wiretaps on Americans for political purposes?
Update: Here is the president talking about leaks in October of 2003:
I’ve always interpreted his remarks as a threat. Think how they would sound coming from the mouth of Tony Soprano:
Randy, you tell me, how many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or have been exposed? Probably none. I mean this town is a — is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there’s a lot of senior officials. I don’t have any idea. I’d like to. I want to know the truth. That’s why I’ve instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators — full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is — partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we’ll find out.
Update II: Haha. The reporter from CNN reports that Scotty was trying to distinguish between a harmful leak and one that serves the public interest. Apparently a harmful leak is one that harms the Bush administration and a leak that serves the public interest is one that helps the Bush administration. Good to know.
Update III: Bush’s leak comments above pertains specifically to Plame so it cannot be used to illustrate his oft repeated admonitions against leaking in general.
Perhaps this one does it better. From the same period in 2003:
Q Mr. President, beyond the actual leak of classified information, there are reports that someone in the administration was trying to—after it was already out—actively spread the story, even calling Ambassador Wilson’s wife “fair game.” Are you asking your staff is anyone did that? And would it be wrong or even a fire-able offense if that happened?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, the investigators will ask our staff about what people did or did not do. This is a town of—where a lot of people leak. And I’ve constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information. And I want to know, I want to know the truth. I want to see to it that the truth prevail. And I hope we can get this investigation done in a thorough way, as quickly as possible.
Here’s the president talking about leaks earlier in his presidency:
Q Mr. President, when you meet with the congressional leadership tomorrow, will you be specific about what they can and cannot relay back up to the Hill? Or, do you just expect them not to relay anything?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m going to talk to the leaders about this. I have talked to them about it. I mean, when the classified information first seeped into the public, I called him on the phone and said, this can’t stand. We can’t have leaks of classified information. It’s not in our nation’s interest.
But we’re now in extraordinary times. And I was in the — when those leaks occurred, by the way, it was right before we committed troops. And I knew full well what was about to happen. And yet, I see in the media that somebody, or somebodies, feel that they should be able to talk about classified information. And that’s just wrong. The leadership understands that.
And if there’s concerns, we’ll work it out. I mean, obviously I understand there needs to be some briefings. I want Don Rumsfeld to feel comfortable briefing members of the Armed Services Committee. But I want Congress to hear loud and clear, it is unacceptable behavior to leak classified information when we have troops at risk. I’m looking forward to reiterating that message. And we will work together. We’ve got a great relationship.
Listen, the four leaders with whom I have breakfast on a weekly basis fully understand the stakes. They fully understand the decision I made. And they will have gotten feedback from their members, and we will discuss it. But one thing is for certain, I have made clear what I expect from Capitol Hill when it comes to classified information.
Be sure to listen to the audio at this link. Be sure that when you do you have access to something to lower your blood pressure as it will, as Rachel says, make you physically sick to hear about the treatment of women in El Salvador.
I’ll be excerpting the article referred to when it comes out. All of this begs the question: Why didn’t this country hear about the abortion laws in El Salvador earlier, like before the 2004 American elections?
SCHNEIDER: I think is it very damaging for the president to be seen here to have come out after his political enemies by authorizing — no crime — by authorizing the leak of classified information from the National Intelligence Estimate.
Again, we don’t know what classified information that was, it’s only described in the special prosecutor’s report as certain information, key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate, relevant portions that were aimed at discrediting the published views of Ambassador Wilson, who criticized the administration’s intelligence-gathering efforts.
He was out to get his political enemy, to discredit Joe Wilson. And he did it by authorizing intelligence information to be leaked. I think most Americans would say that’s a very dangerous and very foolish thing to do.
WHITFIELD: So, the old issue of legality was a topic of conversation, or at least exchange, on Capitol Hill with U.S. Attorney General Gonzales and New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler.
Let’s listen in to what they had to say.
SCHNEIDER: OK.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. JERROLD NADLER (D), NEW YORK: So he could do it for political reasons and that would be — and no one can second-guess that if he wanted to?
ALBERTO GONZALES, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: This president could make the decision to declassify information based upon national security reasons. NADLER: He could do it for political reasons if he wanted to and no one could second guess that because he’s the commander in chief, right?
GONZALES: The president is going to make the determination as to what’s in the best interest of the country.
NADLER: Yes, he might, but he could — I’m asking you a theoretical question about the authority of the president, not necessarily this president. A president could declassify something for political reasons and no one has the authority to second-guess him because he’s the commander in chief, that’s what you’re saying?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHITFIELD: So, Bill, if the president’s approval ratings were in the toilet before, now you can almost expect that they’re going to drop even some more. And what does a president do? I mean, is he essentially a lame-duck president?
SCHNEIDER: Well, look, his approval ratings have dropped for any number of reasons. I think where this does him damage is, on the one issue, the one characteristic that has always been his strong suit, Americans have for the most part considered Bush to be honest and trustworthy. That is really the thing that got him elected, at least by the electoral college, in the year 2000.
In January 2001, when he first took office, 64 percent of Americans thought he was honest and trustworthy. President Clinton’s ratings was down in the 20s. That contrast was very important for President Bush. But now, questions — or serious questions are being raised, is he really honest and trustworthy? Does he level with the American people?
You just heard the congressman say he was leaking political — sensitive intelligence information apparently for political reasons, political reasons, not national security reasons. And that, I think, is going to be very difficult to explain.
Yes it is. This is not an honest administration and the idea of trusting that they are limiting their illegal national security activity only to “terrorists” is ludicrous, whether it’s the NSA spying, Guantanamo, war profiteering or anything else. They lied about the evidence for the Iraq war, for crying out loud (although as this excellent article examines, the press is still unwilling to properly connect the dots.)
President Bush may be the most dishonest president in history, as I believe — or he may be no more dishonest than most presidents, as others believe. But I think we can all agree that the country should not have to depend upon the president’s reputation for personal honesty as to whether they are allowed to break the law.
The NSA wiretapping scandal turns on exactly this issue. Everyone agrees that the government should be able to wiretap terrorists and terrorist sympathizers in the US. But we should not accept that the president or the people who report to him can make the determination as to who those people are without any oversight. There is a long history of other presidents using their power for political purposes and this one is no exception.
George W. Bush cannot be given a free pass on this. If the Democrats win the congress in the fall, we must insist that they ignore the pundits like that brownnosing GOP sycophant Chris Matthews and call these people to account for their actions. The GOP has been pushing this vision of the all-powerful executive for decades, from watergate to Iran Contra to this, and the Democrats have failed to put the stake into its heart. They have to put a stop to it once and for all.
So we find out today that Bush personally authorized leaking sensitive intelligence information for political reasons.
Explain to me again why we should believe that his Justice Department investigation into the leak of his illegal NSA wiretapping program to the NY Times is not for political reasons?
